HP Pavillion xp reinstall hell

I am tearing out what little of my hair I have left trying to reinstall

Windows XP on my computer here. It's pretty much a standard (512mb ram,

160gb c drive, dvdrw, cdrom, etc, etc) out of the box HP Pavillion
a430n, with the exception of a second had drive added.

A couple months back, I managed to totally hose Windows after
installing Linux. When I went back to reinstall Windows (from a retail
cd) I boot from cd, and it gets just past the "checking your computer's

hardware" part, then goes to a blue screen saying an stop error was
encountered, and points to usbport.sys. Sometimes it'll get a little
further, but then give me the same error. This happens on both the
original retail cd I have, and the one I've slipstreamed SP2 into.
Eventually (probably 30-40 tries later) I was able to get it to go
through the entire installation process without crashing.


I've gotten to the point again now where I need to do another clean
windows install on here. I tried the retail cds again with no luck.
(Same problem as before). I finally found my HP restore cds. Popped
those in and restored the hard drive to factory condition, then did a
restore of Windows from that. It seemed to work -- copied all the
windows files over. Then it reboots and goes to the part where it
configures the windows installation -- and promptly fails.


It seems like Windows is not liking something on this PC. Any
suggestions out there? Someone at a local computer shop suggested it
could be a bad RAM chip. He'd be happy to diagnose it for $100, but I'd

like to see if I can't get some suggestions before I shell that out or
replace said RAM.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: System restore (Factory Defaults)
    ... that is not what System Restore is for. ... Did your computer come with Windows XP? ... However, if you have number 1 above (a complete installation CD), just ... necessary to reinstall Windows. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Legally installing same copy on 2 home computers?
    ... been in effect on every version of Windows starting with Windows ... A restore CD ... necessary to reinstall Windows. ... troubleshooting; it should be a last resort, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: full system restore
    ... System Restore is a tool for restoring the operating system to the ... Then after Windows reinstallation you will need to restore your ... data backups and reinstall all your programs. ... do any real troubleshooting (a skill that most of them obviously don't ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: full system restore
    ... System Restore is a tool for restoring the operating system to the ... Then after Windows reinstallation you will need to restore your ... data backups and reinstall all your programs. ... do any real troubleshooting (a skill that most of them obviously don't ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: full system restore
    ... System Restore is a tool for restoring the operating system to the ... Then after Windows reinstallation you will need to restore your ... data backups and reinstall all your programs. ... do any real troubleshooting (a skill that most of them obviously don't ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
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